A very interesting paper crossed my desk from The Australia Institute titled, “Greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries: Where does Australia stand?” by Hal Turton, a researcher in Environmentally Compatible Energy Strategies at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria.

The paper focuses on the following:

“The international climate change community is increasingly turning its attention to proposals to base future greenhouse gas emission reduction obligations at least in part on a per capita principle… This paper reports calculations showing per capita greenhouse gas emissions on a comprehensive basis for all industrialised (Annex I) countries. The data are drawn from national communications and greenhouse gas inventory submissions to the UNFCCC secretariat. The paper presents the most recent and consistent estimates of per capita emissions, covering the years up to and including the year 2001. It also presents historical data on the per capita emissions of all Annex I countries for the years 1990-2001 inclusive.”

The paper concludes that Australia has the highest per capita emissions, Canada has the fastest growth in emissions (since 1990), and the U.S. is relatively high in both categories. Geopolitical events show dramatically in the trend data with large decreases in per capita emissions among counties that comprised the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.

The paper has one glaring weakness – it does not discuss uncertainties in the data, which undoubtedly are quite large in comparison to the estimates. For example, scientists who study the carbon cycle disagree about sources and sinks of CO2, sometimes quite dramatically. Even so, the paper provides an interesting compilation of FCCC data, some of which challenges conventional wisdom.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a long and interesting story about the technology of fetal genetic testing. The technology raises some questions about science policy in the context of the individual as well as society. Here is an excerpt:

“Fetal genetic tests are now routinely used to diagnose diseases as well known as cystic fibrosis and as obscure as fragile X, a form of mental retardation. High-resolution sonograms can detect life-threatening defects like brain cysts as well as treatable conditions like a small hole in the heart or a cleft palate sooner and more reliably than previous generations of the technology. And the risk of Down syndrome, one of the most common birth defects, can be assessed in the first trimester rather than waiting for a second-trimester blood test or amniocentesis. Most couples say they are both profoundly grateful for the new information and hugely burdened by the choices it forces them to make. The availability of tests earlier in pregnancy mean that if they opt for an abortion it can be safer and less public. But first they must decide: What defect, if any, is reason enough to end a pregnancy that was very much wanted? Shortened limbs that could be partly treated with growth hormones? What about a life expectancy of only a few months? What about 30 years? Or a 20 percent chance of mental retardation?”

One woman quoted in the story said of the decision she faced whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, “It was never even anything I had considered until I had the bad results.” Science and technology as they often do create decision situations where before there were apparently none. This is, for example, what happened in the early 1970s when scientists discovered the potential for ozone depletion: It was never anything policy members considered until they had the bad results.

For some the issue quickly becomes more than simply a matter of personal choice:

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This report is the result of a class project undertaken by the students at the University of Colorado enrolled in the Maymester 2004 course ENVS (Environmental Studies) 4800: Critical Thinking: The Use, Misuse, and Abuse of Science in Policy and Politics.

This report is being posted to the internet as a resource for those interested in the role of science in policy and politics. It has not been peer reviewed and is the compilation of 6 group projects conducted for an upper division course at the University of Colorado. I’ve learned a lot from the students work and I hope that you will as well. The individual reports have been edited for style and consistency but not fact-checked or otherwise quality controlled.

As with anything you find online, user beware!

You can find the report here. Your comments and reactions are welcomed and will be shared with the students.

An AAAS forum on climate change, held this week in Washington, DC illustrates, in microcosm just about everything that is wrong with the climate change debate. The forum was put together ostensibly to present scientific perspectives on climate change. Thus, there were papers presented with titles such as “Complexities in the Temperature Signal: Aerosols and Trace Gases,” “Polar Ice, Melting, and Sea Level Change,” and “What Earlier Warm Periods Can Tell Us About the One We’re In”

But let’s be honest — the public, the media, and policy makers care about climate science not because it is interesting (which it is) but because it has significance for how we think about the nature of the climate problem and the scope of potential options in response. Thus, the forum inevitably saw a sort of “mission creep” from science to politics, e.g., as reflected in media coverage.

Consequently, we see statements like the following (as reported here from scientists who participate in the panel:

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Sometimes it seems that proponents of greenhouse gas mitigation are their own worst enemies. In particular, when mitigation proponents cherry pick among available science to make their political case, it opens the door for mitigation opponents to argue legitimately about science instead of policy and politics. But even worse are cases when mitigation proponents play fast and loose with the science in much the same way as mitigation opponents sometimes do.

A good example of playing fast and loose with science can be found in a recently released report on climate change and the insurance industry by the Association of British Insurers (ABI). The report discusses consequences of climate change for the insurance industry. The report includes a characterization of a recent U.K. government report on floods as an important justification for greenhouse gas mitigation policies. I praised the U.K. Foresight report here on April 28, “All assessments of climate science and policy should be as well done as this one.”

It was apparently so well done that the Association of British Insurers found it necessary to mischaracterize its results. The ABI report’s mischaracterization of the Foresight project’s conclusions on flooding is on page 9:

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While in DC, I visited NAS’s Koshland Science Museum, a new(ish) science museum for the older crowd, and gentle plug for the work of the Academies. Their current exhibits focus on climate change and DNA, and I think do an ok job of presenting a basic, skin-deep understanding of some of the science in those fields. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell what the take home message is, except maybe an unsurprising “science is great” spirit. The exhibits seem to skip any hint of values conflicts or political problems, suggesting that DNA testing catches bad guys and not mentioning the possibility of cancelled insurance policies… Not that I’d really expect the NAS to market potential problems, but I do wonder how much the museum can really contribute.

Yesterday The Hill, a newspaper circulated on Capitol Hill, included an article about a proposed policy governing public and private roles and responsibilities for the provision of weather services.  An excerpt:

“Jeff Wimmer earns his living making pretty specific predictions about the weather.  For a few hundred dollars a month, businesses buy forecasts from Wimmer’s company — New York-based Fleet/Compu-Weather — to see not only if skies will be cloudy or clear but exactly when and where.  For a construction company, the information could determine if workers lay concrete, dig a hole or start tomorrow.  The information is “extremely site-specific and delivered in a customized time frame,” Wimmer said. “If you are a roofer, ‘partly cloudy, chance of showers’ doesn’t do you much good.”  But it is getting harder to predict the future of his own business, Wimmer said, thanks to a proposed policy shift at the National Weather Service (NWS), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”

The problem with the debate over roles and responsibilities of the National Weather Service, which has been going on since the end of World War II, is that everyone talks about “solutions” without first describing the “problem” they seek to solve.  This has led to a muddled debate.  I have addressed this issue in a short essay and an article currently under review with the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society:

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So you work extremely hard on your research, write it up for publication, submit to a peer-reviewed journal, meet the demands of the reviewers and editor, and seek your work appear in print.  Then, no one cites it.  What are the odds?

It turns out that the odds are pretty high. A recent paper in the journal BMC Medical Research Methodology looked at more than 30,000 original article and reviews in 235 journals published in current and surgical fields during 2001.  The authors found through October 2003 that “16.7% of articles in a journal accrue half the total number of citations to that journal… 23.7% of articles had not yet been cited.”

But these numbers look pretty high when compared to a more comprehensive study reported by Science magazine in 1991 (available here via JSTOR, subscription required).  Science reported that “55% of the papers published between 1981 and 1985 in journals indexed by [ISI] received no citations at all after they were published.”  And self-citation “accounts for between 5% and 20% of all citations.”  

In a follow-up article, Science reported uncitedness data (over four years) for specific disciplines for papers published in 1984.  It’s not a pretty picture:

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Forbes.com has a fascinating story by Matthew Herper on the spiraling costs of cancer drugs.

“After helping to develop some of the hottest new biotech drugs, Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer doctor Leonard Saltz has come down with a bad case of sticker shock. The price tag for treating patients has increased 500-fold in the last decade.”

While discussing a number of specifc drugs and costs, the article does not mention the growing number of Americans without health insurance, a factor which greatly compounds the problem of drug costs. Nor does it discuss lagging health indicators in the US despite massive expenditures.

Can the US continue today’s de facto rationing of health services to wealthy customers, or will the health sciences, pharmaceuticals, and government act to foster a more equitable system?

The server hosting Prometheus gave up the ghost on Monday. Thanks for your patience while our crack tech team gets us back on track. We’re still missing a few posts from June 3rd on, but hope to have them restored shortly.

Update: We seem to back in business. All the entries have been restored, and their permalinks should be the same. Let us know if you find any problems.